As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, such that the customer does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources. In at least some instances, a customer will want to launch new virtual machines or applications within the cloud environment. It will often be the case, however, that the software or machine images will not be scanned for vulnerability before being available in the environment. While conventional approaches utilize periodic scans, the software or machine images may be vulnerable until such a scan occurs or until an undesirable result occurs as a result of the vulnerability. Unfortunately, at the present time there is no real mechanism for scanning a virtual machine or application before being available in the environment.